Field
The present disclosure relates to techniques for testing optical components. More specifically, the present disclosure relates to an integrated test circuit for determining reflectivity of a mirror.
Related Art
Silicon photonics is a promising technology that can provide large communication bandwidth, large density, low latency and low power consumption for inter-chip and intra-chip connections. In the last few years, significant progress has been made in developing low-cost components for use in inter-chip and intra-chip silicon-photonic connections, including: high-bandwidth efficient silicon modulators, low-loss optical waveguides, wavelength-division-multiplexing (WDM) components, high-speed CMOS optical-waveguide photo-detectors and optical sources (such as lasers).
Many of these components, such as lasers, include an integrated mirror. However, these mirrors are often very sensitive to fabrication variation that can adversely affect performance of the components. It is often difficult to accurately measure the reflectivity of integrated mirrors. Moreover, in the absence of accurate reflectivity measurements, parasitic reflective elements in photonic integrated circuits cannot be appropriately quantified without accurate characterization of their reflectivity, and therefore cannot be reduced by iterative design, fabrication, and validation cycles.
Hence, what is needed is a test structure for measuring the reflectivity of integrated mirrors without the above-described problems.